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The National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES) is a random digit dialing (RDD) survey program developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. The surveys are designed to help NCES collect data directly from households about important education topics. Like many household studies that rely on landline phone sampling frames, NHES has experienced both declining response rates and increasing undercoverage rates. The study described in this report was designed to examine bias in the NHES:2007 due to nonresponse, as well as bias due to noncoverage of households that only had cell phones and households without any telephones. Results from this study suggest that there is no systematic pattern of bias in key statistics from the NHES:2007, though it might underestimate some indicators such as the percentage of preschoolers who watch two or more hours of TV in a typical weekday and overestimate some indicators such as the percentage of preschoolers with mothers who are not in the labor force. Seven appendices are included: (1) Advance, Refusal, and Community Letters; (2) Household Folder; (3) Interviewer Observation Form (IOF); (4) Sorry I Missed You Card; (5) Appointment Card; (6) Field Non-Interview Report Form (NIRF); and (7) Nonresponse Bias Estimates With Unadjusted Base Weights. (Contains 47 footnotes, 59 tables, 4 figures, and 15 exhibits.)

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) assessed the English literacy skills of a nationally representative sample of 18,500 U.S. adults (age 16 and older) residing in private households. NAAL is the first national assessment of adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The NAAL and NALS produced direct estimates of Prose, Document, and Quantitative literacy, each reported on a 0 to 500 scale and on four performance levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient based on this scale. This report, describes the statistical methodology used to produce the model-dependent (indirect) estimates of the percentages of adults at the lowest literacy level for individual states and counties for 1992 and 2003. The measure chosen for the indirect estimation is the percentage of adults lacking Basic prose literacy skills (BPLS). The literacy of adults who lack BPLS ranges from being unable to read and understand any written information in English to being able to locate easily identifiable information in short, commonplace prose text, but nothing more advanced. It should be noted that adults who were not able to take the assessment because they were not able to communicate in English or Spanish (i.e. language barrier cases) are included in the indirect estimates and classified as lacking BPLS because they can be considered to be at the lowest level of English literacy. Three appendices are included: (1) 2003 NAAL predictor variable sources; (2) Indirect estimates of the percentage lacking Basic prose literacy skills and corresponding credible intervals, by state: 2003; and (3) Indirect estimates of the percentage lacking Basic prose literacy skills and corresponding credible intervals, by state: 1992. (Contains 70 footnotes, 2 figures and 21 tables.) [Additional BPLS information is available at: http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/index.aspx]

This technical report explores the extent of potential bias introduced into the U.S. Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) through nonresponse on the part of schools. Data from the third cycle of TIMSS, conducted in April-June, 2003, are the basis for the analyses. The analyses compare selected characteristics likely to reflect bias in participation from participating and non-participating schools. Two forms of analysis were undertaken: a test of the independence of each school characteristic and participation status, and logistic regression in which the conditional independence of selected school characteristics as predictors of participation was examined. The investigation into nonresponse bias at the school level for U.S. TIMSS 2003 samples for grades 4 and 8 shows that there was no statistically significant relationship detected between participation status and the majority of school characteristics that are available for analysis. An appendix provides technical notes. (Contains 29 tables and 4 footnotes.)